Invitation Inserts!

How I Made My Invitations - Inserts

I described how I made my pocketfolds in my previous post, so let's move on to the actual inserts themselves!




We only had a main invitation, map & directions card, accommodations card, and a RSVP card (which directed people to RSVP online via our website, so we didn't have to include a reply envelope)! My fiance designed the text layout, I printed them using a bridesmaid's color printer, and I cut all the inserts based off the dimensions of my pocketfold. The fire & water designs that you see in the left and right corners are the embossed designs.

I researched a lot of different invitation and insert card wordings before we came up with ours, so I wanted to share what we put:

The main insert text reads:

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[Bride's Mom & Dad] and [Groom's Mom & Dad] invite you to join in the celebration as their children
[Bride] & [Groom]
unite their hearts and lives in marriage on Sunday, the seventh of March, two thousand and ten.

Calamigos Ranch
Malibu, California

Ceremony will begin promptly at five o'clock in the evening.
Merrymaking to follow.

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Accommodations insert text reads:

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A block of rooms is being held at:
[Hotel address]

A shuttle to and from Calamigos Ranch will be available for hotel guests. Mention the [Bride/Groom Last Names] Wedding to receive a special rate of $99/night for a standard room. Please reserve before February 4, 2010.

[Hotel contact info]

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RSVP text reads:

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Because your love and friendship have guided and inspired us, please share in our joy as we exchange our wedding vows.

Please RSVP at our wedding website by February 1, 2010:

[Website URL & password]

___ place(s) have been reserved in your honor (we hand-wrote these numbers in)

More detailed information about the wedding, including venue, hotel, registry, and embarassing photos can also be found on the website.

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Map & Directions text reads:

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Please leave early to allow time for Los Angeles traffic.

Because we're still debugging the robots, complimentary valet service will be provided by humans. (My husband's field of work is with automated robotics such as this, so we put this in as a joke as well as to let people know that valet parking was free!)

[Map & written directions]

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Again, the red insert card was the Mohawk Via Vellum 80# coverweight paper in scarlet (same as the red pocketfold) and the blue insert cards were the Astrobright 65# coverweight paper in lunar blue. If you're going for bright, unique colors to match your wedding scheme, you'll most likely end up with the Astrobright line of papers.

First off, one of the design elements in my wedding was fire & water, so we asked one of my bridesmaids who was also an artist to design the graphics based off of a lot of fire/water references I pulled off istockphoto.com. If you don't have an artist friend to beg for help, I'd highly recommend just pulling something off there! They have a LOT of great and cheap images. Here are a few of the references I sent her, although she looked up plenty of her own as well that were much better:


(These were 10490321, 3596259, 4723348 if you're interested)

She created the designs as a vector, and my other bridesmaid works at a company that happens to have a laser-cutting printer! So we made stamps with the designs by laser-cutting rubber, and glued it to a sheet of acrylic and foam backing (to help distribute the pressure when pressing down on the stamp). We tried stamping without the foam and it came out MUCH better with a foamie backing. We also didn't cut the design into the rubber deep enough, so we had to be extra careful when stamping the ink to avoid smudging. Super annoying!

(I have a picture of my bridesmaid staring at the laser printer as the stamp was being cut; I'll put it here tomorrow!)

Here are the five stamps that got created (the red & yellow is the foam backing).



Some words of advice on embossing:
     1) Remember how I mentioned the pitfalls of using colored paper in the previous tutorial? The same applies for embossing as well as printing - the color of the embossing stamp ink and powder come out differently depending on your paper color (and probably paper type as well). So to get an exact shade, you have to practice with a lot of different colored inks and powders. In conclusion, if you have a choice, go with WHITE paper!
     2) With embossing, you basically stamp on some slow-drying ink, cover it with embossing powder, brush off the excess powder, and heat blast the powder until it melts together. Slow-drying ink (PIGMENT ink) is required for this purpose because otherwise the ink will dry too quickly for the powder to catch on. People also recommend the combination of colored ink and transparent powder rather than the other way around (transparent ink and colored powder) because when the powder melts together, it doesn't always do so smoothly, especially if you don't have an ultra-fine powder. So you get left with tiny little bumps and "dents" in your design. Another reason is that you'll get excess powder clinging to the paper, and if the powder is clear, it's not really a problem. Since I used colored powder, I employed my lucky bridesmaids to take paintbrushes to the invitations and brush off the excess powder. Like so!





     3) YES, you can achieve a very fine level of detail with embossing - pretty much exactly what you stamp onto the paper will come out in the embossing. I was skeptical of this at first, but trust me.. it's precise!

So what I ended up using was: for the blue emboss on the red paper, I used the Versamark watermark ink (transparent), and then Pastel Blue Stamp A Mania embossing powder to achieve the exact blue color. For the red emboss on blue paper, I wasn't so lucky, so the closest I got was using the Colormark pigment stamp in Scarlet with Judi Kins embossing powder in red - this yielded a darker, more blood red color on the blue paper, but I was past caring at this point. (This was, however, a better red than I got with transparent ink and colored powder, and other shades and brands of red pigment ink.)



There have been a ton of great embossing tutorials posted online, so I'll just link to a few that have documented it much better than I could: Heat Embossing on Weddingbee, How To Emboss in Weddingbee, Paper Source's How To videos.

Embossing is very easy, somewhat time consuming (but much less so if you use clear powder), but VERY worth it. They create a lovely raised design that add a lot of extra detail to your invitations, and your guests WILL notice. Walk into your local stamping store or Paper Source and they'll be happy to show you a demo! Beware though; you'll most likely walk out of there with tons of embossing supplies and make a lot more work for yourself.

After all the embossing, I smeared glue-stick on the back of the main invite and manually aligned it onto the pocketfold. The main invitation was cut to a particular dimension that would allow a consistent-width border around the edges.



Fin! (We wanted to emboss just about everything paper-related for the wedding, but after this ordeal I was pretty much over it!)

Invitation Pocketfold Tutorial

How I Made My Invitations

We decided to design, cut, emboss, print, and assemble these entirely ourselves. Let me just say that it was an INCREDIBLE cost saver, but we got WAY overambitious and it ended up taking a looooooooooong time. I can't say it wasn't worth it, but it was a source of stress for awhile. =) So I don't really recommend this to anyone else.. but I do think our invitations kicked ass!

Before I start, a quick overview and retrospective:
     1) We bought our raw paper supplies from Kelly Paper - I can't recommend them enough. They have these awesome warehouses where you can go in and feel/see the paper for yourself, and buy samples to take home. Their prices are unbeatable - I got 250 sheets of Astrobrights cover weight paper for $13!! You really can't beat that. So we bought all our paper here.
     2) Be aware of the weight/size of your invitation! USPS charges different rates if something's square or over 1 ounce. I was able to use the regular 44 cent stamps out of pure luck - we were just below the limit and had decided to go with regular #10 envelopes (albeit in a bright color for variety).
     3) Use colored paper wisely. It'll change the color of your ink when printing and when embossing.
     4) Be aware of the fact that people rip envelopes and throw away invitations almost immediately. My heart was crushed when one of my roommates had got back from a Saturday wedding of a close friend, and by Sunday the invitation was already in the trash. It convinced me not to spend the extra money on a nice vellum envelope and too fancy paper. Good for my budget!
     5) Give yourself a loooot of time for the invitations. They're more time-consuming than you think, even if you take an easier route!

The high level walkthrough of what we did:
      1) Cut and folded our own pocketfolds. They're really expensive to buy, but super easy (and tedious) to fold yourself!
     2) Created our own graphics. My bridesmaid designed these for us off a fire/water theme.
     3) Created our own custom rubber stamps. My bridesmaid works at a company that has a laser cutting printer, so she had stamps made out of rubber for us, which was AMAZING! But we unfortunately cut the stamps too shallow into the rubber, so we ran into a lot of problems with ink smudges.
     4) Embossed the designs. More on this later on the embossing walkthrough, but as fun as embossing is, it's also time-consuming (at least if you do it the way we did!)

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Paper Supplies (all purchased from Kelly Paper): Cost total $78.27 (with a lot of extra to spare for table numbers, placecards, favor tags, thank you cards, and maybe even some extra to sell onto future brides)
     1) 250 sheets of Astrobright 65# coverweight paper in lunar blue in 8.5 x 11" to cut up for the inserts
     2) 17 sheets of Mohawk Via Vellum 80# coverweight paper in scarlet in 26 x 40" to cut up for the pocketfolds
     3) 500 Astrobright smooth finish lunar blue envelopes in #10 (standard envelope size)


Tools: (purchased from Michaels and JoAnns)
     1) Bone folder (OPTIONAL)
     2) 1/4" doublesided tape
     3) Ruler
     4) Cricut portable paper trimmer with cutting and scoring blades
     5) Color printer
     6) Glue sticks
     7) Sharpies & pencils
     8) Patient and kind bridesmaids!
     9) Scissors & exacto knife

Embossing Supplies:
     1) Custom stamps
     2) Red & blue embossing powder
     3) Colorbox red pigment ink
     4) Versamark watermark ink
     5) Small brushes (to brush the extra powder off)
     6) Tons of extra paper to catch embossing powder (hello, multitudes of Victoria's Secret catalogs!)
     7) Heat gun
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I took a lot of inspiration from many online resources, but the one that clinched it was Heather's DIY Pocketfolds walkthrough.

First I'll review how we made the pocketfolds. It's a bit long so I'll review the inserts and more embossing details in the next post.

We started with the red paper for the pocketfolds, cutting it down from one huge 26 x 40" sheet to ten rectangles of 18.7 cm by 30.6 cm. (Sorry for the random unit switching! I just measured with whatever came out with a nicer measurement.) I snuck into numerous Kinko's around town and hogged their giant paper cutter for days and days! Kelly Paper also could do this for a nominal fee, but I was feeling cheap and decided to do it myself. In retrospect, they only charged $20 as a cutting fee, and I really should have just had them do it.. but oh well!




I then used the scoring blade on my paper trimmer and scored the paper in half lengthwise, and then 9.2cm from the right side for the flaps. Alternatively you can also use the ruler & bone folder to make the mark. This is just to make your fold cleaner and give you a guide on where to fold. I HIGHLY recommend this. If you take a thick coverweight piece of paper and fold it with and without scoring lines, you'll see the difference.




Then I made templates on how I wanted the pocket and closing flap to look like. These would be lined up against the right side (within the small area where we made the scoring line). We wanted the pocket that held the inserts to be an inverted triangle, and the closing flap to be another triangle that would both prop up the invitation as well as close the invitation (which is that extra rectangular piece on the blue template).



I traced the templates onto the red paper with a pencil, and cut!



To yield this!



Then I folded the paper along the scoring lines, lengthwise and for each triangular piece. I also made an additional scoring line along the closing flap rectangle as that needed to be folded in. I also made two cuts with an X-acto knife to use as slots for inserting the closing flaps (this will make sense later). For this, I used the ruler as a cutting guide along with pencil marks to indicate where the cuts should be.



So at this point, this is what the pocketfold looked like:



For the side with the inverted triangle cut out, I used the double-sided tape to tape it closed. (I actually was unable to find 1/8" thickness doublesided tape, so I just cut the 1/4" tape in half. I actually wouldn't recommend this tape.. it held just fine when we were working with it, but once we put the inserts in, they started popping open! I would perhaps recommend some sort of glue if you can get it precise enough.)



My friend made me an oversized K stamp, which I dipped into the watermark ink and embossed with blue powder.



I also drew a black arrow onto the closing flap rectangle so guests would understand that there was a purpose for it! (I also put pictures on the wedding website of the invitation propped up.) I glued on the main invitation and slipped in the inserts (more on how the inserts were made in the next tutorial).




To close the invitation, you fold the invitation in half lengthwise, and then take the triangular flap sticking out and insert the top of the triangle into the slit we cut into the middle of the pocketfolder. And then you get a K! (Both me and my husband's first names start with a K.)



And when you open it and insert the flap, the invitation stands on its own!



Then we printed the addresses on the blue envelopes and our return address on the back flap (no handwriting the addresses for this bride!) and off they went!



Credits:
- Bridesmaid CK for laser-cutting the K stamp for me (more details on the stamp making in the insert tutorial)
- Kelly Paper for their awesome paper, prices, and service
- Bride & Groom for designing the pocketfolds
- Michael's, JoAnn's, Paper Source, and Stampin' From the Heart (Culver City) for embossing demos and supplies (more details on the embossing in the insert tutorial)

Introduction

During my wedding planning process, so many of my ideas, vendors, answers to my questions, and comfort came from the multitude of wedding websites and blogs. I've been blogging for the last 10 years, so I always wanted to contribute my own wedding progress to the mix, but I chose not to so I could leave everything as a surprise to my guests. But now that I'm done, I wanted to give back and basically vomit all my wedding information back onto the internet for future brides to research! My wedding was a very DIY type of affair as I didn't have a coordinator's help, and I also tend to over-research everything so I hope this will be a great resource for anyone who's wedding planning.

This is what I'll be covering, in some order or another:
     1) Engagement shoot photos
     2) Wedding photos (and full recap)
     3) Vendor reviews and a list of other vendors I researched
     4) How I made my invitations
     5) Wedding details
     6) Honeymoon recap
     7) Planning photos and details (Dress shopping, centerpiece making, etc...)

Please feel free to contact me with any questions you might have about vendors, planning, DIY details, and anything else you might need!! I think every past, present, and future bride loves to talk wedding stuff, no matter how long ago their wedding might have been. :)